$$$ Seamless Prims Alignment Reward $$$

ok............enough is enough.....anyone capable of explaining and teaching me how to make ABSOLUTELY seamless prims alignment????????



"NO DOTTED LINES, JUST PERFECT MATCH!!!"




please IM me to set an appointment and reward details.......and please be ready to show me at least one proof of ur skills..........house will do .......................thanx


SHTAX Waffle

First of all, use of quotation marks fail.

On topic, it's not as hard as it seems. You just want to zoom in really close (Hold ALT, left click and drag) and move the prim a teeny bit at a time til it's where you want it to be. You can also use the numbers in the position part of the edit window. There's really no such thing as perfect seam alignment though. There's always a seam, and a trained eye can always find it. Most of what hides seams is good texturing, and making sure the seams aren't in overly obvious places. Hope that helps.

There is no such thing as absolutely perfect in SL. Even the most closely aligned seams are going to flash a little bit during sun set/ sun rise when the light angles hit them right.

Even hacking the xml file and expanding the decimal places out will still not make prim alignment absolutely perfect.

Learn to not discard the good in search of the perfect and do the best you can.

Unfortunately, a completely perfect seam between two abutted prims is not possible. Windlight has a tendency to highlight edges, making the seams brighter, or occasionally darker, than the visible surface on both sides. And resolution limits in SL mean that any seam, when viewed at an angle, will ALWAYS show some "stair-stepping", through which the abutted edges will show.

Some builders will use a 100% alpha texture on the abutted edges, trying to avoid this. But that just means that what peeks through is whatever the next set of pixels on that line of sight. Still may be better, if that next surface is at least parallel to the surface you are trying to make seamless.

You could try to make a "seam filler prim", matching the texture at the seam edges, and just fractionally submerged within the seam. That will almost always also still show a small seam, or will show a 'surface flicker' that is even worse than the dotted line seam. Not to mention increasing the complexity of the prim count unnecessarily.

For our own viewing only, you can get a high-end graphics card and make sure anti-aliasing is active. This will make it a little better, but only for you.

Hi,

i have followed this thread silently and after reading all explanations i feel like i need to share my own experiences with seams in SL. As always i get very detailed and apologies if i get boring, but since SHTAX has asked for a tutorial here is some background information from my personal practical experience...


lighting effects
=========

First i can Second Ceera with the Windlight effect on object edges. This effect can best be seen with sculpted prims, not so obvious with standard prims. The effect is caused (to my knowledge) from the fact that adjacent faces not necessarily have the same normals and thus "light reflection" behaves different on those faces. And this can be seen at the edges of the adjacent faces. This causes darkening/lightening in order to moderate the effect of sharp edges between faces... For sculpties the effect gets realy visible at the true sculptie edges, e.g. at the ends of an open cylinder you see significant darkening/lightening ... There is even a technical name for this phaenomen, but i forgot it.

ok, lets forget sculpties for now and go back to standard prims.
The real annoyance starts, when you perfectly align 2 chunks of a wall, and you think, these 2 objects should be texturisable seamlessly, because all mathematical precision tells that it is possible. But you see dotted lines, dependent from the vieweing angle. ugly, annoying, frustrating. Now we got "artificial seams" (that's how i name them)


causes of artificial seams
================

"artificial seams" are secondary effects caused by the rendering process. For all cases i encountered until today i have detected 2 causes for such seams:

1.) The objects are NOT perfectly aligned, so you can see that they are a little distance appart, or they overlap (making the edge flicker with camera movement). This can easily be solved by using numbers instead of the mouse to position your prims, rez the prims and take care, that during prim aligning the rotation of all prims is set to ZERO or multiples of 90 degrees(!), use the grid and snap tools... and take care, care, care...

2.) The used textures are not "seamless tileable". Even the standard textures are not perfect in that. I tested with the default plywould yesterday, it is quite good, but it got some "errors" in the texture so that you can see seams...

So what you need in order to succeed are absolutely perfect tileable textures. The main point here is, that textures are pixels at the end. And on the edges you typically get an effect which you know as "aliasing effect". This efffect happens, when the textures do not fit perfectly (bit to bit!) and thus they form visible "artificial patterns", which our eyes seem to detect with ease.

perfect tileable textures
===============

The "poor mans" tiling algorythm is to mirror a texture on both the x- and y- axis and recombine the mirrored parts so that the edges get tileable. (Although you can get perfect tileable textures with this technique, i do not recommend this, because it typically generates ugly artificial patterns (not seams), which you don't want to have either)

There are quite a lot of good texture maker programs out in the world which also know about "perfect tiling algorythms". I myself used Genetica with much success (There is a free version with limited functionality available, but it is still great for many uses). But i think even photoshop has got a texture maker plugin for tileable textures.

I hope, these words are of help to whoever has got the patience to read up till here

happy building

well......the point is that prim is already where it is supposed to be.......moving it plus or minus for the 000.001 will make the prim totally off...........


seams to me that ........the whole seams thing is becomes a matter of how to camouflage it and reduce the flickering instead of just making/having it right.......

all those comments "not to discard the good in search of the perfect" are just unacceptable........

just like in real world we will pursue the idea and vision of a better (second) life and no matter how many will say that is just a game or that people really dont care about the seams......its about the evolution...........and i can imagine one day that lindens or maybe some other metaverse provider will offer a truly seamlessly aligned prims world............

I have sent you a "wall" of 8 blocks perfectly aligned and texturised. I can't see any seams on this object. Do you see seams on the object ? That would be interesting ...

Maybe it is also a matter of the viewer (i use the RC) ?
Or the Graphic card (i have access to a GTX-8800) ?

Gaia

Can you send me them as well please, I'd like to also take a look?

Hummm. I tried earlier today to set up a test case, with three cubes lined up "by the numbers" and textured blank, with a solid color tint. In past clients that would always show at least some seam at certain sun angles and viewing angles. But it didn't today, even on my older system with anti-aliasing turned off.

I build using the Prim Docker. It aligns the prims saving me the math.

It also aligns textures so the patterns repeat perfectly. However a bad texture will still show a pattern.

Building on the grid helps, N~S & E~W reduces the math errors and round off problems.

Avoiding rotating prims in building also helps for the same reasons.

Using grid snap helps.

Using even sizes helps. A 2m prim aligns easier than a 3.333m prim, which is way difficult.

Coloring the abutting ends can help.

There is an in-world tutorial where they recommend shifting prims so the edge is slightly behind another prim from the viewer's perspective. It is sort of a stair step thing. I don't find it that useful.

Avoiding shiny helps in some cases.

Otherwise... just turn out the lights.

yes it is interesting.......i just put two pics of that "wall"on the web..........so u can see what i see in my 1.21.6.99587 mac version of sl viewer ............

please, take a look...........


http://iliawebfolio.com/Picture1.png
http://iliawebfolio.com/Picture2.png

Hmm

Mr Waffle, where is your object detail slider? Push it all the way to the right if it is not all ready.

Preferences > graphics > click detail to see all the fun stuff

edit: what's my reward?

........it is just the same no matter if slider is at the low, mid or high level....Ms Alisha

This problem is caused by aliasing artifacts on the prim edges which make a few pixels from the hidden face visible. And if the light source is at the right angel then the hidden face will be lit more then the visible face making it stand out hence the apparent seam when there really is no seam.

You can significantly reduce this problem by darkening all the hidden faces, but to get rid of it completely you have to run the client at a higher resolution and/or turn on anti aliasing. Unfortunately you can't force people to do the last two so to conclude...there is no silver bullet.

Darn thought i won.. =P

The advice of turning up resolution and anti-aliasing is good too. It going to be hard to build seamlessly if you are having trouble seeing what seamless is.

And here is my view on them:



The full view:



A detailed view


the same detail view but objects selected.

No seams. I could not find an angle from where i could see the artefacts as you show on your pics... I use

Second Life 1.22.9 (110075) Feb 10 2009 12:43:24 (Second Life Release Candidate)

and yes, i have turned anitaliasing on to the maximum. Maybe that explains it all ?

exactly........ it is this the essence of the problem........... seeing seamlessly what seamlessly is........ and i just cant go on pretending that everything is just fine coz i turned my AA on...........


.......coz if anything on my side....... hardware or software wise is somehow set that i see seams....... how come then, that i am able to see, rare yet exisiting, buildings in sl that were built without them?........... truly seamlessly ..............

....... i dont want to by a new computer or change setup if i am able to find houses in sl that are just perfectly seamless?........i just want to make such houses..............

When you mention angle, do you mean when camming around your 8 blocks, you could not find any angle where seams were obvious?

exactly. I meanwhile studied this thing a little further and found, that i can see seams when i turn off anti aliasing and put my graphic settings to minimum. then SL turns into a very crapy environment... but i can not see such a big derivation as SHTAX has show on his pictures. I see little dots but not complete seam-lines as you see...

What i learn from this is that i should build in the lowest possible graphic mode, or at least test how my objects look alike in that mode ... phew... so what i wrote down earlier is probably still correct, but not so relevant as i thought. the capabilities of the hardware seem to contribute mostly to the effect.

@SHTAX: You say, you found "truly seamless objects" ? can you publish an LM ?

Gaia,

I checked those boxes in world and turning everything down I could not get any seams to appear.

Also, rotating all the boxes to get the different light angles and changing all the settings I still could not find any seams and yes I can confirm they are 100% aligned as well.

Given the pics that Shtax posted I can only assume it is confined to his PC setup, even using one of my older PC's that does not officially meet SL's requirement I still cannot get anything like he's getting with the seams.

He's due to get a new system shortly so hopefully he'll follow up to say if things are any better or not.

also don't forget the fun of the epic bug on prim alignment. They may be aligned today, tomorrow is another matter. The Jira is still out there.

Prim Drift oh the fun...

Ok on this topic (as I was to star another one but we're on the subject already)


I know HEIGHT YOU ARE BUILDING AT comes into play here (according that what I have read)

Mathematica error creep in more at high altitude (if you build in a skybox for example)

I'm taking errors LESS than the .001 you can see with the defauly un hacked editor and perhaps this is why they don't give us an extra digit as that extra digit would vary.

Albeit. I would love just "1" more digit as I often find a gap where +.001 or -.001 is too much and .0005 would probably be a snug fit.

So, MY QUESTION is this: (and we're going with the build in a sky box idea here for the moment)

When you RE-REZ an item from your inventory, does it RE-SET the coords to the nearest .001 or does it leave the innacuracies in the prims?

what I mean is. Say we are bulding by maths at 4000m up, you know, 10x10x0.25 with another prim next to it, 10m away, so all spot on. BUT in reality, if we could see it' they are not lined up. One prim is 4000.000121 in the sky, the other is 4000.000197, and a similar error (unseable on the standard viewer) side by side.

You zoom in and can see perhaps come flicker as the digits have the errors (due to the height)

So you link them, and take them from their 4000 height. TP down to the ground and RE-REZ them at 50m up in the air.

When you RE-REZ them at 50m will they keep the "Accurate Innacuracies" so to say, with the unseable erros still in place, or (due to ground being more mathematically accurate) will the Rezzing at 50m reset these numbers ad they are being entered into the world a-fresh?

Bit of a long winded way to ask a simple question

Oh, and perhaps also.....

If you have an error. Is there any way or (In effec) zero'ing this maths erros out, perhaps re-rezzing, or moving away then moveing back to position?

Thanks